I Remember…

...When I was little I use to with Legos, Erector sets with the neighborhood kids and as I got older some of my neighborhood kids played Little League but I was never into sports. The rest of the neighborhood kids played in the woods and built tree forts and fought imaginary battles. At night we use to play hide and seek or chase fireflies. We didn’t have many structured games we used our imagination and came up with created ways to entertain ourselves and explore our environment. So when I found this on a friends Facebook page I read the article…

Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan
Prometheus Books
By Gabrielle Principe
[…]
For more than 99 percent of human existence childhood was spent in a natural environment. Children spent their days roaming in packs and playing on their own in the out-of-doors. They improvised their play, invented games, and made up their own rules. Education was informal and new skills were learned through interacting with peers and encountering the natural world.

Today, infants find themselves strapped into bouncy seats and plunked in front of the TV set; preschoolers are given talking doll houses and battery-powered frogs that teach them their ABCs; and older children sit in front of computers with iPods in their ears texting friends.

Although such artificial environments have made life easier and more secure for children, scientists are finding that this new lifestyle is having unwanted side effects on children’s brains. In Your Brain on Childhood, developmental psychologist Gabrielle Principe reviews the consequences of raising children in today’s highly unnatural environments and suggests ways in which parents can learn to naturalize childhood again, so that a child’s environment gels with how the brain was designed to grow.

I was watching my grandnieces and grandnephews play with Logos one Christmas building the toy pictured on the box (I believe it was an action figure from Star Wars) and when they went on to another toy, I started to build something with the Legos and I got chided for not building the picture on the box. They were using their imagination but only within the confines outlined on the box, they were zoom around the room fighting imaginary space battles with it; but if you wanted to build a tank with the Legos, they didn’t like that.

The book review goes on to say,

The startling implication is that today’s structured, controlled, and fabricated surroundings are exactly wrong for developing brains. Instead of emphasizing technology and organized activities, parents and teachers could better help children learn by encouraging exploration, experimentation, and exposure to the real world…

Now it seems like that Little League goes for the whole summer and there is no time for family activities, it seems like the summer about going from one camp to another summer camp. From band camp to cheerleader camp to soccer camp. When my brother and I were little we use to travel all over the eastern U.S. by car exploring the countryside. We explored the caves of New York State, the civil war battle fields and visited just about every national park this side of the Mississippi and we didn’t have a built-in TV to watch or an electronic game to play. Instead we looked for Burma Shave signs or Mail Pouch tobacco barns or find a particular state license plates (My brother always won because he was usually sitting on the driver side of the car).

The review goes on to say,

…Recess, now often dismissed as a waste of time, should be considered an essential part of children’s cognitive and social development; lessons should be individualized as much as possible; and the current focus on homework and letter grades should be de-emphasized and eventually eliminated altogether.

Now it is “teach the test” we don’t want individual thinking, heaven help the child that asks “why?” What are the first classes that are dropped from the curriculum? Art and music, we don’t need those they are not on the standardized tests.

When I got summoned to jury duty they had signs all over the building about turning off your cell phones and while the judge was giving his speech to us a twenty-something was texting away. The judge looked at the sheriff who want over and took away the man’s cell phone. The guy argued with the judge that he needed to keep in touch with work and the guy looked like he was going through drug withdraws for the rest of the day. I know that I am attached to emails, I feel lost if I haven’t checked my emails at least a couple of times a day.

I’m glad that I am in my sixties because I sure hate to see the results of this grand experiment.